October 29, 2012

This year’s FIAPAC Congress, in October in Edinburgh, Scotland,
brought together 460 delegates from 45 countries. Most were front-line
abortion “providers”, that is, abortionists, clinic administrators and
counsellors, and three quarters were women, feminists all. Many of them
wore shaved heads and work boots.

The male minority were mostly abortionists. One South American
attendee wore his silver hair in a long pony tail and cowboy boots.
Australia’s leading late-term abortionist appeared in Jackaroo (cowboy)
garb — jeans with a big belt buckle, cowboy boots and a black t-shirt.
The European abortionists, who work in hospitals rather than run their
own clinics, were generally more conservatively dressed. And there was
also a smattering of pro-abortion lawyers, policy hacks, statisticians
and researchers.

Given the gruesome nature of their work, it is not surprising that
these hardened abortion activists were there to be inspired. Ann Furedi
was head cheerleader for that job. As the CEO of the British Pregnancy
Advisory Service, which provides about one quarter of all British
abortions and specializes in late-term abortions, Furedi has been one of
Britain’s most vocal abortion-on-demand advocates for decades. She is
also a notorious Leftist who used to edit Living Marxism and
married the British Revolutionary Communist Party leader. Her opening
plenary talk, believe it or not, was entitled “The Moral Case for
Abortion.”

Having to contend with “all those Lennart Nilsson photos of a 17
week-old fetus sucking its thumb,” has made abortion activists like us
“necessarily a little bit apologetic,” she complained. "It's not
surprising that a lot of young people are not enthusiastic about
abortion. They're not enthusiastic about killing unborn babies."

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"We need to claim the moral high ground," she continued in her effort to
rally her abortion-minded listeners. And she did that by asserting that
women’s equality cannot be achieved without a right to abortion. “We
cannot have equality if we are constantly victims of our own fertility. A
woman is not just a vehicle for pregnancy."

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"De-medicalization" turned out to be a recurrent theme throughout the
conference. The early abortion rights movement may have argued that
legal abortion was needed to prevent all those “backstreet abortions” by
untrained profiteers, but today’s activists want abortion out of the
hospital and back on the street, if not in a back alley. They want
abortions performed by “mid-level” professionals trained in quick crash
courses, or by women themselves — illegally, if necessary.

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Much of the push for do-it-yourself abortions comes from lack of
doctors willing to do the job. British abortionist Katie Guthrie
lamented the fact that most aspiring medical doctors just don’t see
abortion as a rewarding career choice. She criticized the British
National Health Service for allowing medical students to forgo training
in abortions, although it does offer special training programs for those
that do want to be abortionists.

A woman in the audience raised the “sensitive” topic of sex selective
abortion. It’s been a niggling conundrum for pro-choice feminists for a
long time, but not so much for choice-absolutists at the conference.
“Clearly, if we are pro-choice we have to respect that even choices we
don’t like will be made,” said Fisher.

Moral high-grounder Furedi, whose BPAS clinics have been investigated
for sex-selective abortions, nodded approvingly. She went on to say
that extending abortion time limits up to the point of childbirth can
actually prevent some abortions, because women sometimes decide to keep
the baby they would have aborted earlier. They have more time to make
the right decision "for them." “Whether or not we think late abortions
should be provided depends on how much we trust women to make decisions
for themselves,” concluded Furedi.

“There is nothing magical about passing through the birth canal that
transforms the fetus into a person,” Furedi asserted. Following this
extreme pro-abortion logic to its logical end, one has to ask: does the
newborn have a right to life if the mother’s circumstances change, if
she discovers a disability, or if she changes her mind? An item on the
agenda at the next FIAPAC Congress perhaps.

October 25, 2012

The political spot has graphic pictures.The Randall Terry for President bit requires some explanation. He is aiming to pull votes from Obama - there is a strategy behind it. And it forces stations to accept television spots like this one.

October 24, 2012

Tuesday, October 30th7:00-11:00PM7:00-8:00PM Right to Life Holy Hour with Rosary8:00-9:00PM Social Hour and Introduction (Father Wilson Hall)9:00-11:00PM Viewing of October Baby and Discussion/Q&A (Father Wilson Hall)Refreshments will be provided.Please note: This movie is rated PG-13. Children under 13 are not permitted without parental permission.Assumption Church, 131 Union Ave., Peekskill, NY 10566Rectory Phone: 914.737.2071

“October Baby” tells the story of Hannah, 19, a home-schooled Baptist
who is told by a doctor that her ailments — asthma, seizures, moodiness —
are the result of being born prematurely after an abortion attempt.

Hannah sets out to find her birth mother, a quest that ends in tears
and, ultimately, a lesson in forgiveness delivered by a Catholic priest.

LifeNet wants to remind you that tonight, Thursday, October 18th is the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City! Both President Obama and Presidential- candidate Governor Mitt Romney will be in attendance. There will no doubt be a number of street protests outside the hotel to challenge the Foundation's and the Cardinal's invitation to President Obama. Several witness participants will be meeting at the Lexington Avenue side of the hotel (49th and 50th Streets, between Lexington and Park) around 6:30 p.m.

There has been considerable controversy about the invitation extended to the President by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, especially this year when the Catholic Church has come under such direct assault through his Health and Human Services mandate. The mandate would force the Church and its various organizations to provide insurance to employees for contraceptives, sterilizations and abortions against the Church's most deeply held religious and moral beliefs.

Never before has the anti-Catholic, anti-religious-freedom landscape been so starkly obvious as it has been during Obama's Administration. The Cardinal's assurances that the Al Smith dinner is not a political event has not relieved the concerns of many of the faithful who suggest that this annual event will be used as a photo op for President Obama just days before our country's most critical Presidential election on November 6th.

The race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is razor close, with pro-life Governor Romney just beginning to pull ahead in many critical electoral voting districts. The fear is that this will be used to convince Catholics, especially those not following federal legislation closely, that the anti-life, anti-Catholic Church bent of Obama's administration is nothing more than a trifle. The impact to the Catholic vote is critical in this contentious race for the White House and for the ultimate direction of our country.

President Obama is the most anti-life President on record. Previous presidents like Bill Clinton were not invited for far less objectionable reasons than Obama has accumulated. People have been voicing their concerns to Cardinal Dolan and will do so again this evening. It is, afterall, our First Amendment right to do so, and more importantly follows the dictates of rightly-formed consciences on these basic matters of religious freedom and life and death for the most vulnerable among us.

Over 53 million unborn children have been destroyed in the womb since the ill-informed Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in America. More info about the dinner at: www.alsmithfoundation.org/thedinner.html

October 15, 2012

The latest winner
of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan, is a Chinese author whose
“popular, sprawling, bawdy tales bring to life rural China”.

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Mo is also a critic of the one-child policy in China who can speak from personal experience. His most recent work, Wa,
highlights the reality of coercive family planning/population control
in China.It tells the story of a rural gynaecologist who delivers
babies and also performs abortions in enforcing the one-child policy.
In 2010, Mo discussed in an interview his own experiences of forcing his wife to abort their second child:

“‘I
personally believe the one-child policy is a bad policy. If there were
no one-child policy, I would have two or three children.’

‘When
I was serving in the army, I was promoted to the rank of officer,’ said
Mo Yan. ‘There was another officer in the army who lost his
rank…because he had a second child. I was afraid I would receive the
same punishment, so I chose not to have another child. If it were not
for my own selfish ambition, I would have let my wife have a second or
even a third baby. I used a very high-sounding rationale to convince her
we needed to abort the baby: we had to follow the Party’s policy and
nation’s policy. This has become an eternal scar in the deepest part of
my heart...It became a big shadow in my heart.’"

The core of Yamanaka’s discovery was that scientists could create
stem cells with all the same properties as those derived from embryos
without killing—or even using—embryos at all. (When this scientific
breakthrough was first announced in November 2007, I explained the
science and ethics of this new technique in “The End of the Stem-Cell Wars.” Alas, a better title would have been “What Should Be the End of the Stem-Cell Wars.”)

Inspiration can appear in unexpected places. Dr. Shinya
Yamanaka found it while looking through a microscope at a friend’s
fertility clinic.… He looked down the microscope at one of the human
embryos stored at the clinic. The glimpse changed his scientific career.
“When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realized there was such a small
difference between it and my daughters,” said Dr. Yamanaka.… “I thought,
we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be
another way.”

After years of high-pitched debate and front-page news coverage, surprisingly little has been heard on the subject of stem cells since the 2007 breakthrough on alternative stem-cell research.

October 08, 2012

"Their findings have revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop," the Nobel committee at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said in announcing the 8 million kronor ($1.2 million) award. It was the first of this year's Nobel Prizes, with five more awards to be announced by next Monday.

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More than 40 years after Gurdon's discovery, in 2006, Yamanaka, 50, showed that a surprisingly simple recipe could turn mature cells back into primitive cells, which in turn could be prodded into different kinds of mature cells.

Basically, the primitive cells were the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, which had been embroiled in controversy because to get human embryonic cells, human embryos had to be destroyed. Yamanaka's method provided a way to get such primitive cells without destroying embryos.

"The discoveries of Gurdon and Yamanaka have shown that specialized cells can turn back the developmental clock under certain circumstances," the committee said. "These discoveries have also provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine."

The Ambulatory Specialty Surgery Center of Brooklyn on 43rd St., closed earlier this month and will reopen in October as a new medical center providing outpatient surgeries, but not abortion.

Catholic leaders claimed the clinic’s closure after 22 years as a victory for their anti-abortion effort. Abortion advocates said they had never heard of a clinic in the city closing under pressure from protesters.

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Monsignor Philip Reilly - leader of the group the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants - said he has gone to the center every week since it first opened to protest the abortions.

Reilly said both he and local Catholics were so happy, a celebration mass was held on Saturday at St. Michael’s Church on the same block as the clinic.

“It’s a complete victory,” said Reilly. “The people who are doing it have evolved and their hearts have changed.”